I was in my early twenties when I first began cooking seriously with fire. At the time I was working alongside Hugh, who was in the process of transforming an old dairy farm just outside the market town of Bridport into the first incarnation of River Cottage HQ. His approach to food was unlike anything I had experienced before. The cooking was honest, seasonal and instinctive, and much of it happened outdoors. For me it was an exciting and experimental time, and it was there that my fascination with wood-fired cooking really began.

Among the first things we built were a pair of large clay wood-burning ovens just outside the kitchen door. They were far from beautiful. Their surfaces were rough, their shapes slightly irregular, and they looked more like something dug from the earth than carefully constructed. Yet they had a certain rugged charm, and more importantly, they worked brilliantly.

Until then I had never cooked in anything quite like them. There were no temperature dials, no switches, no convenient digital displays. Everything depended on fire, fuel and observation. At first I simply learned as I went along. But it did not take long to realise that these ovens were extraordinarily versatile. When they were blazing hot they cooked with incredible speed and intensity. When the fire had died back and the oven had begun to cool, they provided a gentler, slower heat that could be used for entirely different kinds of cooking.

Before long I was using these rustic ovens in much the same way I might use a conventional oven in a kitchen. The difference was that the heat was not something you controlled instantly. Instead it was something you learned to read and anticipate. The more I cooked with them, the more I began to understand their character and how to get the best from them.